Robyn Hood Black - children's author, poet, artist

 

Greetings, Poetry Lovers!  We are more than halfway through Poetry Month. Time flies! 

 

April 17 is (was) International Haiku Poetry Day.  You can learn more about that here.

 

Each year, among its celebrations, The Haiku Foundation hosts the Earthrise Rolling Haiku Collaboration.  Haiku poets around the world are invited to submit haiku on a particular theme, with the editors choosing a "seed" poem to start it all off.  In theory, folks would add their poems at dawn, wherever they are.  But it's Thursday afternoon as I write this, and I just added a poem. It's dawn-o'clock somewhere. 

 

You can click that link to read about this year's theme and read several poems editor Jim Kacian included for inspiration, as well as the seed poem. 

 

In short, the poems relate to glaciers this year.  An apt image and metaphor for so many explorations.  

 

In snooping around online about my own area's geologic history, I wondered how far south glaciers came in the ice age.  They didn't cover the Southern Appalachians, which is one reason we have one of the most biologically diverse temperate regions in the world.  The geologic history (lots of species moved down here when the ice encroached), and the topography and climate (many variations of elevation and all kinds of microhabitats exist) - plus the stability of the mountain range - make for amazing discoveries around every bend. 

 

Because a haiku needs juxtaposition, and I like to write poems connected to my own sensory and lived experiences, I wondered if I could somehow incorporate the recent wildfires in our area. 

 

The Table Rock complex fire was the largest in upstate South Carolina's history, burning more than 15,000 acres last month. (My husband and I have a special connection to Table Rock, as that's where he proposed decades ago when we were at Furman, and we hiked it again year before last.) Turns out it also has a pond with roots in the Ice Age!  Who knew?  I don't know how the pond fared with the fire, but I hope it will live to see another mellinium or ten.  

 

 

wildfire smoke
a Pleistocene pond
in the watershed

 

Robyn Hood Black

 

 

Here's to slowing down for a poetic moment or two this week and this month....  To read the rolling haiku, some of which are responses to other posted poems, click here.

Our multi-talented and ever-reflective Jone Rush MacCulloch has the Roundup this week; Thanks, Jone.  Remember to follow the 2025 Kidlit Progressive Poem. And for all-things-Poetry-Month in the Kidlit bloggie realm, see Jama's roundup here.

I won't have a post next week, as it's our son Seth's and his bride Ginnie's wedding weekend! :0) Enjoy the rest of Poetry Month, and I'll see you with the May flowers. 

 

Greetings, Poetry Lovers!  As I type this on Thursday, it's rainy outside.  Lots of rain lately has been welcome; the recent Table Rock fires not far from us in upstate South Carolina are now 100 percent contained, and parts of the state park re-opened on Monday.  Even if I don't see rainbows outside, I feel them!

 

Rainbows are not confined to the sky, of course.  Our own Matt Forrest Essenwine went on a poetic rainbow hunt, and just look at what he brought back.  His new collection, A Universe of Rainbows - Multicolored Poems for a Multicolored World (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers), introduces young readers (and readers of all ages!) to rainbows all around us in both expected and surprising places, with poems by 20 luminous poets. Acclaimed illustrator Jamey Christoph brings the words to light and life in painterly digital images, a project that was more than a year in the making, according to his website. 

 

It's a perfect volume for Spring, for Poetry Month, and for wonder-seekers at any time of year.  There are many thoughtful blog posts celebrating this new anthology, and the book cast its colorful glow on Jama's Alphabet Soup just last Friday.  Matt happened to be the host for last week's Poetry Friday Roundup, and his post offers a beautiful tribute to Lee Bennett Hopkins, to whom the book is dedicated.  You'll also find a list of posts celebrating the anthology's launch, so you can go rainbow hopping! Of course, the best rainbow hopping happens in the book - from a cave in Patagonia to a mountain range in China to a star nursery in our galaxy to a collection of crystals in a window sill - maybe yours?

 

The Rainbow Keeper

 

by Irene Latham

 

There's a girl who loves brilliant things:

crystals, gemstones, diamond rings.

She digs them up, wipes them clean.

She asks them: what wonders have you seen?

She marvels at their varied colors -- 

periwinkle, lime, cyan, butter.

She sings to them of geometry, of heat.

She displays them on her bedroom window seat.

Crystals are her favorite find -- 

especially the broken kind.

Their way of speaking is to glimmer,

shimmer, SHINE!

How do they make their tiny rainbows?

only the Rainbow Keeper knows.

 

©Irene Latham.   Used with permission.

 

 

And if you've never made it to Colombia (I haven't), you can travel to a colorful river there:

 

 

Caño Cristales

 

by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

 

I'm a river in a rainbow.

I'm a rainbow in a river.

I ran away from Paradise.

(Or so do some believe.)

 

I glow in red and golden hues

but half the year I'm greens and blues.

I am a simple river

with a secret up my sleeve.

 

Color!

 

Today I'm rainbow poured in water.

Soon again I will be plain

magnificent and ordinary

as I carry crystal rain.

 

We each are much more than we seem.

Allow yourself, my child, to dream.

 

 

©Amy Ludwig VanDerwater. Used with permission.

 

 

Each poem (several of which shine through particular poetic forms!) is presented with an unobtrusive, reader-friendly scientific sidebar.  At the end of the book, you'll find resources for every rainbow included as well as a glossary.

 

Thank you to Eerdmans Books for Young Readers for sending me a copy of this shimmering book! And thanks to Irene Latham and Amy Ludwig VanDerwater for allowing me to share their poems.  And of course, thanks to Matt Forrest Essenwine for bringing all these colors out of his his imagination and into these fine poems!

 

Speaking of Irene, rainbow-hop over to Live Your Poem for this week's Roundup.  Remember to follow the Kidlit Progressive Poem (see last week's post) and visit Jama's Alphabet Soup again for a Roundup of all-things-Poetry-Month in the Kidlitosphere. 

 

Greetings, Poetry Lovers, and Happy National Poetry Month! (& Happy Poetry Friday if you're here Friday!)

 

I'm delighted to have our annual Kidlit Progressive Poem park here for Day Three. The Progressive Poem was launched several years ago by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem and is now tended by Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche.  It always brings surprises. 

 

For this year's offering, Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise wrote the first *perfect*  line, and Tricia Stohr-Hunt of The Miss Rumphius Effect handed me a delicious second line.  My addition is the third line in bold. A few comments about it are below the month's schedule.

 

 

Open an April window
let sunlight paint the air

stippling every dogwood

 

 

(Take it away, Donna, at Mainely Write!)

 

Here's the month's lineup. (Please excuse my lack of hyperlinks, but my website doesn't do those without my manually putting in each one, and I've got a deadline this week! Link to active links is below the list.)

 

April 1 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
April 2 Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect
April 3 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
April 4 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
April 5 Denise Krebs at Dare to Care
April 6 Buffy Silverman
April 7 Jone Rush MacCulloch
April 8 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
April 9 Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference
April 10 Marcie Flinchum Atkins
April 11 Rose Capelli at Imagine the Possibilities
April 12 Fran Haley at Lit Bits and Pieces
April 13 Cathy Stenquist
April 14 Janet Fagel at Mainely Write
April 15 Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink
April 16 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm
April 17 Kim Johnson at Common Threads
April 18 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
April 19 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page
April 20 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
April 21 Tanita Davis
April 22 Patricia Franz
April 23 Ruth at There's no such thing as a Godforsaken town
April 24 Linda Kulp Trout
April 25 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
April 26 Michelle Kogan
April 27 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
April 28 Pamela Ross at Words in Flight
April 29 Diane Davis at Starting Again in Poetry
April 30 April Halprin Wayland at Teaching Authors

 

Here is the sign-up page at Margaret's blog with all the links.

 

 

Why dogwoods in my line? Because they've been delighting me for the past week or so here in upstate South Carolina!  I did make sure their range includes Maine, so I wasn't tossing a unfamiliar image to Donna.  And I wasn't really trying to turn my back on those of you west of the Mississippi; I just wanted to include a specific detail. 

 

I tried to generally echo the syllables/rhythm of the first line, and chose "stippling" to add another "p" sound to those in "Open," "April," and "paint." Now Donna can decide whether to make a rhyme and a traditional four-line stanza - or NOT!  I love that each poet can make her/his own path turning the poem. 

 

In case you saw my post last week, I'll add that I was particularly struck by "let sunlight paint the air" because we've all been hyper-focused on the air here in upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina in the past couple of weeks because of wildfires.  (Our house is about 7-8 miles from one of them.) Depending on which way the wind blew, we had oppressive smoke or clear-ish skies.  But last weekend, things improved. (Except that we sent all our smoke across the line to North Carolina for a couple of days - sorry!) Federal help arrived a week or so ago and brought big equipment and more folks, and then we had RAIN on Sunday and Monday.  The containment percentages for all these fires went up slowly over the week (in the 90s as I type this early Thursday), residents have been allowed to return to their homes, and burn bans have been lifted.  The acreage burned in the Table Rock Complex fires totaled more than 15,000, making it the largest fire in Upstate South Carolina history. 

 

If you're still reading this, and you're reading on Friday, be sure to visit oh-so-busy Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme for this week's Poetry Friday Roundup.  And be sure to check our generous Jama's roundup of poetry events for April in the kidlitosphere at Jama's Alphabet Soup.